Every day more film work is being done inside a computer. Maybe it’s an impossible action shot, a beautiful background or just a few wires disappearing. In any case, computer special effects have changed filming. The downside is the computer rendering that makes those shots possible takes time and horsepower. That represents a heavy up-front investment, according to Kevin Baillie (pictured), co-founder of Atomic Fiction Canada Inc. and chief executive officer of Conductor Technologies Inc.

“… We realized fixed infrastructure within a market that naturally ebbs and flows, there wasn’t a match there,” said Baillie. “We looked for solutions, and cloud was a very obvious one at that point. So we made the jump.”

Baillie spoke to Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during this week’s NAB Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. (*Disclosure below.)

Martin and Baillie discussed the benefits of cloud technology for a computer render farm, a place where a bunch of computers work together to produce film and video images. This computer-generated imagery is then used in movies, commercials, video games and all sorts of other media. Given the workflows of a rendering studio, cloud technology is a perfect match, Baillie said.

Breaking free of the infrastructure box

Before the cloud, rendering was limited by the hardware available to a company. That infrastructure was both expensive and uncertain. Would it be enough to handle the next job? Is the company paying for way more hardware than they need? The cloud changes that by bringing scalability to the rendering world, Baillie explained.

“With the cloud, we can say, I need a thousand computers three minutes from now,” he stated. The cloud offers companies both compute and software by the minute, allowing scale on demand. From a flexibility standpoint, the difference is transformative.

While the major benefit is that a business pays only for what they use, that can also be a downside. Without a bit of care, things can get expensive quickly, Baillie explained. Conductor Technologies is using analytics and machine learning to help refine what needs to be sent to the cloud.

“We can help people run their entire business better,” Baillie said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the NAB Show. (*Disclosure: Western Digital is sponsoring theCUBE’s coverage at the show. Neither Western Digital nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE